Who's Pinterested?

With Instagram snapped up, everyone’s looking to Pinterest. Who’s got the cash and looking to spend? Business Insider cornered Google VP of corporate development David Lawee, who handles their M&A. Their biggest problem, he says, is video discovery:

"If you look at what we're rooted in, it's kind of obvious what we're looking for....The most challenging problem we have right now is discovery of video, that's the most challenging problem on the web. Social is one enabler, tagging is one enabler."

Now, company does face a few other issues at the moment. There are the privacy concerns. Then there's the rise of walled gardens Google can’t trawl. There's even getting more traction on the aforementioned enabler, social.

But video is certainly an issue looming on the horizon, and Google isn't the only member of the old guard trying to get out in front of the problem. Nor does it sound like integrating Google+ into search results was enough to crack the discovery nut. Lawee admitted their current social layer helped but it's "not even 1 percent where it should be."

At any rate, Pinterest did recently add support for Vimeo pinning, and they already had YouTube functionality. So they’re certainly working on the video-discovery-via-social problem. And Google seems to have noticed, because Lawee called Pinterest “a phenomenon that’s extraordinary.”

Sounds like someone has lost some 20 percent time to pictures of cupcakes!